Northern Ireland
Internment, Torture and Pro-government Militia in Northern Ireland
How do liberal democracies justify policies that violate the rights of targeted subsets of their citizenry? When facing national security emergencies (real or imagined) which threaten a state's sovereignty or national narratives, government officials in countries throughout the world exempt themselves from maintaining certain rights-based protections and selectively surrender their commitments to democratic legal processes. States target select racial, religious, or ethnic groups—often construed as foreigners who threaten existing laws or institutions — with extrajudicial surveillance, internment without trial, or torture. In democracies with liberal constitutions, such repressive state policies directly violate basic constitutional guarantees to liberty, equal protection, and due process. Understanding how these rights protections are eroded is of central importance to this political moment. This project sheds light on these dynamics through systematically analyzing the British Prime Ministers’ recently declassified security-related correspondence files, which document the lead up to, as well as the internal discussions and decisions about, Northern Ireland’s use of internment without trial between 1971 and 1973, using a combination of qualitative process tracing and NLP methods.
This project has spawned two sub-analyses: First, we seek to evaluate the British Government’s treatment of pro-government militia to aid in understanding how the state considers and constructs different classes of citizenship. Second, we are building a micro-level event dataset (every 72 hours) of pro-government, state and republican violence during the first four years of the Troubles.
This project is funded by National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Award #1823547 - “Civil Rights Violations and the Democratic Rule of Law,” (Emily K. Gade, Principal Investigator, with co-PIs Michael McCann and Noah Smith, 2018-2020).
Published articles:
Tanweer, Anissa Emily K. Gade, Peaks Krafft and Sarah K. Dreier. “Why Data Science Needs Qualitative Thinking," (2021). OnlineFirst, Harvard Data Science Review.
Working articles:
“Troubles in/with Text: NLP Approaches to Analyzing Government Archives,” Sarah K. Dreier, Sofia Serreno, Emily K. Gade, and Noah A. Smith. Under review.
“The Veneer of Liberal Law: How Britain Justified Internment without Trial in N.Ireland,” Sarah Dreier, Emily K. Gade and Michael McCann.
“Micro-event Data from the Troubles in Northern Ireland." Working event dataset drawn from internal British Military reports produced for the Prime Minister every 72 hours during the first four years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
“‘An alternative to being shot’: Using archives to track how states rationalize rights violations,” Sarah Dreier and Emily K. Gade.